Furious Heaven by Kate Elliott

Author:Kate Elliott [Elliott, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

60

Interlude at the Tail End of a Tow Chain

Captain the Honorable Amity Jīn gives her reflection a final look before she leaves her cabin. On the days she expects a fleet-wide message to arrive from the Keoe she puts on her service dress uniform as if she were going to physically meet with Queen-Marshal Sun. The peculiar circumstances of a knnu transit demand a high standard of morale and discipline. She’s not one to boast of her ribbons and medallions but small details matter when the crunch comes. Most of the spacers on the frigate Bennu fought at Karnos. They know she’s one of twelve battlefield promotions to captain of her own ship. She has a lot to live up to.

She studies the scar on her jaw and tests the new joint in her elbow, which functions better every day although it’s still stiff. An alarm chimes. Time to go.

She heads forward toward the bridge. The name is an artifact of the Celestial Empire, what her scholar aunt calls “a shard of the past which we hold in our hands without truly understanding what it meant to our ancestors.”

As she passes the door into the officers’ wardroom, it slides aside. Ensign Semisi Fairweather Alsuva trots out, carrying a tray of freshly baked buns. When she gives him an inquiring eyebrow he says, “For the tactical training.” She ducks in to grab a sealed bulb of freshly brewed tea. Along a bulkhead, the panels for the wardroom lifepods shine a steady green. Ventilation hums. All stable, all ahead.

“Anything else, Captain?” From the galley, Petty Officer Thea James Alhonolulu gestures toward a cooling rack of ginger buns, sweet fried sesame buns, and compsognathus-tail buns. The smell is divine.

“I’ll be back later,” Amity promises.

A marine undogs the hatch onto the bridge and swings it aside. As she enters, the officer on watch calls out, “Captain on the bridge.”

Vanna vacates the captain’s chair, but she waves him back. “I’m here for the drop.”

She passes the forward hatch and into the narrow service passages that thread the heavily armored fore of the ship. Part of a beacon drive has to be in the ship’s bow, because it is not a propulsive drive but more of a message a beacon registers before it translates the ship in a seeming instant through its coil and across vast distances into the coil of its linked beacon. The Bennu’s engineers have taken advantage of the enforced downtime to perform a complete maintenance cycle of the beacon drive components. She avoids their current work areas in the bow because calibration and cleaning is a tricky process, easy to contaminate or throw off tune.

One of the armored fore compartments was rigged before departure for the grapple that connects each ship to its place in the tow chain. The Keoe has five chains. Four are placed equidistant around the outer circumference of the ship’s circular stern and the fifth in the center, which the Bennu’s crew jokingly calls the navel string. Ships

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